Dr. Phil Plait comes at science blogging with some heavy credentials, having actually worked on the Hubble Space Telescope and, to a lesser extent, the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) programs. His blog, Bad Astronomy, began life as an outlet for his frustration at the misuses and misunderstandings of astronomy in popular culture, but soon became a venue for his advocacy of all things science-based.

From 2008 to 2010, Dr. Plait was the President of the James Randi Educational Foundation, a group which advocates for science and critical thinking. Hes written two books, the most recent of which is Death From the Skies, chronicling all the ways the universe might kill us all, and recently created and starred in three pilot episodes of a Discovery Channel program called Bad Universe.

Keith Daniels: You spent years working on the Cosmic Background Explorer and then on Hubble. Why did you feel that focusing instead on science education and popularization were where you were needed the most?

Phil Plait: [Laughs]. Where I was needed the most! Yes, Im Captain Astronomy, here to save the world from its misuses and abuse! I dont know if Id phrase it that way precisely, but yeah, I was doing some research on Hubble. I wasnt on COBE for very long, but I did use Hubble when I was in graduate school, and then for several years afterwards. Its not that I was needed more elsewhere, it was more along the lines of... I really enjoyed talking about this. I always have. I like writing about it. I like talking to people about astronomy, and I just started doing it. What I found was that the more I did it, the more I liked it. As far as research goes, a lot of it was really cool, and really interesting, but it didnt sing to me. It didnt feel like my calling. It felt more like getting out there and writing about this, and showing people whats going on... it was more fun and more gratifying. I guess it is important, you know?! People are interested in this kind of stuff and its cool, and I wanted to make sure everybody sees whats going on in the sky above their heads. I guess thats why I started spending more and more time doing it.

KD: Youve published two books, youve had a popular blog, and youve done tons of public speaking, but last year you did a television show, Bad Universe. Is television another level entirely?

PP: Yeah, its kind of terrifying. A one minute cameo on Jersey Shore can actually reach more people than a year of blogging, which is sad, but true. Yeah, television is a terrific medium. Its really good for astronomy, because astronomy is a really visual science. There are two broad appeals of astronomy: one is that it is simply beautiful -- you have these pictures of galaxies and planets and all these things.. its artwork, its just fantastic, and every time I get a press release, or a note on Twitter or something, from Hubble, or the European Southern Observatory, or any of these groups, I always get excited, because I know theres going to be some sort of really beautiful image involved with it, and thats great. The other prong of the fork is: it appeals to our brains. Astronomy covers a lot of really great questions that weve had forever, including, Why are we here?, How did we get here?, Is the universe all there is?, Is there life on other planets?, How big is big?, Is the universe infinite? All of these [questions] can be realistically claimed by astronomy. So, I think there are these two reasons that it really appeals to people, and on television you can tackle a lot of this stuff. Now, its kind of hard to dive in and say, Heres precisely why stars blow up, or, Heres how black holes work. Its not easy to do that in a 42-minute documentary, and have it make sense, and still have people watching by the end of it, but its still a terrific medium for that and something that Ive always wanted to do. So I was pretty excited to be able to get the documentary.

KD: You mentioned answering the Big Questions with astronomy. Going all the way back to its beginnings as a science, astronomy has always had an almost... political... dimension. Why do you think that is? For example, why does it make the news every time Stephen Hawking even mentions the word God?

PP: [Laughs]. I dont know about politics, but its always had strong roots in our psyche. You can imagine, in an agricultural society, they need to know when their seasons start. They need to know when their rivers going to flood. They need to know when the days are going to start getting longer, that sort of thing, and astronomy tells them that. The seasons are astronomical, and so people were tied to the skies. Plus the fact that, before big cities, people were more familiar with the sky. It was darker at night. Now we have so many people living in the cities and suburbs that theyre not as tied to the sky as they used to be. So its not surprising to me that theres a deep and rich history of astronomy being tied to people. Nowadays, theres so many different ways astronomy plays on people. On the Internet, certainly, it connects with people. A lot of the people who were originally on the internet were, yknow, geeks like me, and so they were already interested in astronomy. Then youve got this reliance on experts that is kind of funny. Stephen Hawking, everybody knows who he is, although they may not know why they know who he is. I mean, heres a guy who, 30 years ago, was breaking ground with black hole research as a theoretical astronomer and astrophysicist, and he came up with some really cool ideas and became very famous for it. Now, when he says anything its newsworthy, which I think says more about us than it does about him, whether hes right or wrong. Ive disagreed with him on a couple of things he said, but yeah, he comes in and says something like, We dont need God to explain the universe, [and] its huge news, and I think thats funny, because a lot of people have been saying that for a long time. [Laughs]. That idea goes back a long time, but for some reason, when a famous scientist says it, it becomes newsworthy. Im not sure exactly what it means, but I guess if people have somebody they look up to and respect and then he says something like this, its controversial. And of course the media these days, anything that has anything to do with religion, they like to play it up.

KD: Youre also involved in the skeptical movement with the James Randi Educational Foundation, and TAM. Skepticism is often seen as a negative process, yknow, debunking, but one of the common themes of your work is demonstrating just how awesome actual science is. Do you feel thats more important than demonstrating what isnt true?

PP: Yeah! People think skepticism is a bunch of cynical old balding white men with beards, and Im like, Im not cynical! I am a middle-aged white guy with increasingly flesh-colored hair -- thats the way I usually phrase it -- and a beard, so I guess I kind of fit in to that, but Im not cynical. People think that skepticism is cynicism, its saying, No, thats not true, and thats not at all what skepticism says. That is an output of skepticism if the evidence points that way, but what it really is is a way of looking at stuff and saying, Whats the evidence for this? Heres a claim, I think that there is a 75-foot purple turtle living in my basement. Alright, Whats your evidence for this? You start looking at the evidence and saying, This is good evidence, This is bad evidence, Where do you stand on this?, Whats the precedent for this? You can look into all these different ideas, and then at the end, look at them all and say, Whats my conclusion? Is my conclusion that, This idea does not make sense, or This idea does make sense, it might make sense, I dont know, but skepticism is not a conclusion, its a process. Its basically the same process science uses: you make a claim, you look at the evidence to support it, or that tears it down, and you make up your mind based on that evidence. Everybody is skeptical of something, and it may be something as mundane as going out and buying a car, and looking at the car salesman and saying, He really wants to make this sale, so is he going to mention that in crash tests this car tends to explode and kill everybody within a 100 mile radius? Maybe he wont, because he wants to make that sale. That is skepticism, looking at why somebody might be making a claim. Now, there are all sorts of logical traps. You dont want to immediately assume that persons lying to you because they may have a vested interest in making that sale, but youve got to make sure youre looking at all these things, and thats what a skeptic does. What is the claim somebody is making? Why are they making it? What is the evidence for that claim? Do I have evidence that supports or denies that claim? Does the claim even make sense? You can look at all these things and come to a conclusion, and you can apply that to more than just comparison shopping. You can do that when youre listening to a politician, or a religious leader, or a scientist. When somebody tells you -- and this is where it really gets important -- I think vaccines cause autism, I think if I drink this water, in a couple of days Ill feel better and my shingles will go away, or something like that. These are testable claims, and thats what skepticism looks at: the evidence for testable claims. Its really easy to fool people, and its really easy to fool yourself, and if you use these skeptical ideas, you find out what the truth is. The whole idea of skepticism and science is to find out whats most likely to be true, and whats most likely not to be true. Thats the goal: to not fool ourselves, and thats where the real power of skepticism is. Thats why it bugs me when people think its a negative thing -- its not! Its the most positive thing we have. It is the search for the real, objective truth.

KD: Do you think a lot of skeptics themselves get the wrong idea? You gave a famous speech at TAM 8 called Dont Be a Dick...

PP: Uh-oh, here we go.

KD: ...I think its tempting sometimes to lash out, as an atheist myself, because were possibly the last group in the U.S. that its completely OK to discriminate against. I read a poll recently that more people would rather have an openly gay President than an atheist, for example.

PP: Thats right. Its the last subculture that its OK to make fun of, or be prejudiced against. Its amazing, and polls show that when people are asked, Can an atheist be moral?, a lot of people think, No, you need to be religious to be moral, which is fascinating. Thats completely wrong, and theres a lot of evidence that that claim is wrong. Atheists can be moral without religion. As far as the dont be a dick talk goes, the two problems with it were that I didnt have a lot of time to make all the points I wanted to make, and so that made it really misinterpreted. What I found out was that a lot of people really read-in their own prejudices into that talk which were not at all what I meant, which happens. A lot of times people [hear] different things in something youre saying than what you originally meant. Whats funny is: they were reading stuff in that I never said. A lot of people were saying, Oh, Phil is saying we should just stand by the sidelines and wring our hands and never say anything bad about people.... I didnt say that! Oh my gosh, I was very clear to say that we need our passion, we need to fight, that Im not giving a free pass to anybody. Its ridiculous that people have said that, and Ive seen that over and over again. If you read anything Ive ever written... right as were talking Ive got a window open for a blog post about people claiming that an airplane con-trail was a missile, from last November. Theres an ex-politician who is still rattling his saber about this...

KD: This is the one in L.A.?

PP: Yeah. It was an airplane flying over L.A., but he was saying it was a missile launch. Heres a guy who is an ex-Senator from New Hampshire writing an op-ed about this, saying, Why arent we getting any answers about this?, and making an off-hand comment about Obama not being a citizen, and all this stuff, crazy talk. Im like... no, [skeptics] dont have to let this stuff go! You can be forceful, but Im not going to call this guy an idiot. I might use mockery. I think mockery is OK: satire is a well-established method of showing something is silly, and I dont have any problems with that. What I dont like are the attacks: the mean-spirited, immediate reactions that a lot of people have when they feel like whatever it is theyre fighting against is ticking them off. I see this all the time... not just arguments -- Ive had arguments with people all the time, it happens -- but its the really over-the-top dickishness. I was vague on that term on purpose, because you can insult somebody, and even that might not be a real dick-headed move. There are times when its uncalled for, when its really over-the-top, and thats what I was trying to say. You dont have to be super nice. You dont have to be all polite and milquetoast-y about this, but studies have shown repeatedly that when an argument gets really heated, youre less likely to convince the other person -- theyre going to dig their heels in even more. The fact of the matter is that when people are watching an argument like that, if somebodys being a real jerk, people who are listening to that argument arent going to listen to the person they perceive as being a jerk. Theyre going to find ways of saying, That guys being a jerk, and so I dont think what hes saying is true. So, my point is that, if your goal is to convince people that youre right, its probably best to try to restrain yourself a little bit. I get angry. I get furious. Babies are dying because people arent vaccinating enough. Whooping Cough is literally killing infants who are too young to get vaccinated. [ed. note -- And thus depend on the herd immunity of the people around them.] How angry do I get about that? So angry I cant speak, where my blood-pressure goes up, and I cant sleep at night, Im so furious about this kind of stuff. Its difficult to restrain yourself, but I think its necessary if you want to make a difference in this world.

KD: On the internet, it seems like someone cant just say, I didnt really care for that movie, instead its, the Worst Movie Ever.

PP: The internet is a terrific medium because it gives everybody a voice, but its also a terrible medium because it gives everybody a voice. You look at comments, like on Youtube if you want to go to the absolute rock bottom, but even on Twitter... Its just so easy to snark. Its so easy to just make fun of stuff. When youre driving down the road and somebody cuts you off, its suddenly, I want to murder this guy! When the airline announces that the flight is delayed fifteen minutes, Oh, this is terrible! How can they do this? Really? There are people starving in the world, and dying from epidemics, and its so easy to get into that mindset of first world problems. I love it when people say, I know this is a first world problem, but..., and its like, Good! Im glad you see that, because its really easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. We are such a reactive species that when somebody says something, youre like, Oh no, youre full of crap, you idiot. How can you possibly believe that? I see it all the time in skepticism, and its easy because people are attacking your beliefs. Its your self-identity! When you introduce yourself to someone, what do you say? Im an astronomer, Im a Catholic. You identify yourself with these words, and so when somebody attacks those words, theyre attacking you. Youve got to be super careful not to trip that reaction, because as soon as you do, the arguments done -- youre not going to make any headway that way.

KD: What are the most common mistakes you feel most scientists make in dealing with the media? Do you feel that media literacy should be added to the curricula of science educations?

PP: Oh God... The most common mistake scientists make [in talking to the media] is talking to the media. No, its really kind of funny. This is a long, looong argument thats been going on for as long as there has been science and the media. Scientists need to talk to the media, for all kinds of reasons. The public loves this kind of stuff, in general. A lot of polls show that the public want more science, and they like it, so I think its important for scientists to talk to the public. Plus, the public pays for a lot of the science, so I think youre kind of obligated to talk to them and say, Heres what your moneys going for. Thats not to say that every scientist is good at talking to the media; some are, some arent, just like anybody else. On the flip side of that, the media... a lot of them want to do this right, they try to do this right, but youve got people who dont understand the science trying to report on it, and that makes it really difficult to get a really good, accurate story. In the meantime, you get a lot of misquoting. Every astronomer I know -- and I mean that almost literally -- has been interviewed for the news, a newspaper, a website, whatever, and the journalist has gotten their story almost completely backwards. Theyve either inserted the word not, or left the word not out. So a story about, This asteroid is not going to destroy the Earth, kinda turns into the opposite story, and so they report it as, This asteroid may destroy the Earth. [Laughs.] It just gets inflated beyond reason. A lot of the media online are irresponsible that way: its not really journalism, its churn-alism. Theyre trying to stir the pot. They dont care if its accurate or not. If it bleeds, it leads. So, if they can say, Oh, astronomers say this asteroids going to hit us in 2036, and itll blow up with the yield of all our nuclear weapons, even though that is completely not true, and not at all what the astronomer said, theyll write it, and hey, it makes [that website] popular for a short amount of time. You can fight that kind of stuff, but its going to be there forever. If people are going to do that, theyre going to do that. I just wish there were more science reporters, and more people trained in science. CNN let go of Miles OBrien, who was basically their best science reporter, and CNNs science reporting has been abysmal since then. Thats true for a lot of big sites, theyve just been consolidating and trying to save money, and whats happening is their science reporting has gone into the trash can.

KD: On Thursday the shuttle Discovery is set to launch. Its possible that it could be the last shuttle launch ever. Is there any positive side to the end of the shuttle program?

PP: Its the last launch for Discovery. Theres one more shuttle launch later this year for, I think, Endeavor, and these are both going up to the space station to deliver pieces of it and crew and all that kind of thing. The shuttles an interesting machine. Its a magnificent, complex, amazing rocket that can actually lift a huge amount of material into orbit, which is hard to do. The problem is it was sort of billed as a space truck: it was going to launch every two weeks, and it was going to be cheap. The original NASA designs for it were kind of going to be that way, but it became a political football. Anything that costs a certain amount of money, suddenly every congressman wants their district involved with it, and it just got more and more bloated, got more and more complicated, and eventually basically could [only] be launched four or five times a year and couldnt do a lot of the stuff that NASA wanted it to do originally. So, considering it costs a billion dollars a flight, or something like that, yeah, seeing the shuttle go away is not entirely a bad thing. The problem is, because of all the political issues over the past few years, we dont have a replacement rocket. A lot of people are saying, Obamas killing the shuttle and manned-space program. Thats bull. That makes me so upset when people say that, because that is total crap. It was George [W] Bush who cancelled the shuttle program, and said, You guys are going to have your last flight in 2010, get moving on this, and the problem was it was too late to actually design, build, and test a replacement rocket. So, no matter what, even before Obama was even sworn in, it was too late to have a replacement for the shuttle and not have this several-year gap. Im hoping that NASA will come up with a good replacement for it, and, in the meantime, private industry will be able to launch payloads into orbit. SpaceX is a company thats doing that -- testing a rocket right now -- and its looking pretty good that theyll be able to have launches to the space station within the next couple of years. I think thats what should be happening. I think private industry should be taking over this routine, quote-unquote, space truck business. Let NASA be paving that road, and then let private industry follow.

KD: Do you feel like the Obama administration has done better, in general, on science issues than the Bush administration?

PP: Youre setting a pretty low bar there. The Bush administration did a lot to absolutely destroy science, from the stem-cell issue, to global warming, to a hundred other things, including infiltrating NASA with political hacks -- which happened, a few years ago I reported on that quite a bit. There was a P.R. guy there was who was trying to downplay global warming and the Big Bang in NASA science. It was pretty astonishing. So it would be pretty easy, just by not doing anything, to do better than the Bush administration, and Obamas administration has done quite a bit. They could do a huge amount more. I mean, he talks a good talks, in his State of the Union and other things, about getting science back to where it should be, but he had two years of a Democratic Congress and couldnt seem to get it done. I know that the Republicans did a lot to obstruct a lot of that, and now that the Republicans have a majority again, theyre attacking science with glee as far as global warming goes -- and some other issues of science. Its really astonishing to see this anti-reality force brazenly saying things which are just grossly and provably false about issues like global warming, evolution, and that sort of thing. These attacks on science are pretty brazen. I would like to see Obama and the Democrats -- and Republicans! -- standing up to this sort of thing. I dont know what happened over the past ten years. Ever since Newt Gingrich destroyed the Office of Science and Technology in Congress, things have been on a long downhill slide for science, and its terrible. Our economy depends on science and tech, and were raising a generation of kids to not understand this stuff. Carl Sagan talked about this even before it was happening, politically, and said this is a recipe for disaster. Hes still right.

KD: He was pretty much right about everything.

PP: [Laughs]. Well, not everything. Im re-reading The Demon-Haunted World right now, which is as far Im concerned his best work, and even though it was written fifteen years ago -- something like that -- you know, I hate to use the word prophetic, but it really does seem like a prophecy of the 21st century right now. The things he said could be a blog comment off of things that happened on the news the night before. Its amazing that he basically called all this stuff out, and said weve got to be super careful about what our politicians are doing, and how this fundamentalist religious stronghold on science is growing. Its bad, its really bad. If kids dont understand evolution... If a state board of education... [cough]Texas[cough] ...comes out and says that Evolution is a crock and Creationism should be taught in class, biomedical industries are not going to want to go to Texas, or Louisiana, or any of these other states that are downplaying [science]. Theyre not going to want to go there if the only people they can hire are people who think the Earth is 6,000 years old. This has a real, fundamental -- ha ha ha -- financial impact on this country.

KD: Speaking of hiring people who think the Earth is 6,000 years old. The University of Kentucky recently settled out of court in the case of Martin Gaskell, who was probably discriminated against in his application to become the Director of the universitys new observatory, on religious grounds, because hes a Young-Earth Creationist...

KD: Religious discrimination is illegal, but in cases like that, is it wrong?

PP: You know, thats a really, really good question, and I wrestled with that. When the news came out it was unclear to me exactly what was going on, and then, as time went on and more emails were released, it became a lot more clear. It was funny how a lot of the science blogs were fomenting about this, and I thought, You dont really know! Youre saying this, but you dont really know exactly what happened. Then it became clear that, yeah, the religious discrimination was pretty obvious. These guys [from the University of Kentucky] were saying, This guys a religious fundamentalist, and we dont want him representing our university, so were not going to hire him, and that is illegal. Like you said, is that right? Should you be able to discriminate against somebody on religious grounds? I think, yes, you should, because if somebodys religion dictates to them that the Earth is 6,000 years old, Im not going to hire them to teach geology, astronomy, biology, archeology, or any of a hundred other ologies, because, clearly, all the real evidence points to the Earth being billions of years old not thousands. I wouldnt be able to trust somebody to separate their religious belief in a young Earth from the actual truth of the matter, which is that the Earth is old. Its interesting that we have these laws against religious discrimination; theyre too broad, basically. If Im going to hire somebody at a fast-food restaurant, or to be my waiter or... whatever, if it has nothing to do with religion, then yeah, you shouldnt be able to discriminate against their religion any more than you should because theyre a man or a woman, or theyre gay, or theyre black, or whatever. But, when it comes to their beliefs having a direct impact on the job requirements, you should be able to discriminate, because the word discriminate means to be able to separate somebody out because of the evidence. I dont think you should be prejudiced. On the other hand, I do think you should be able to look at all the job requirements and see if what they believe will interfere with that. You dont expect a Catholic church to hire an atheist to be a priest -- now, the Catholic church may not be getting public funding to do that, but maybe they are -- but the point here is that when the job requires something, and their religious beliefs will interfere with that requirement, then you dont have to hire them. If somebody applies to a job where I need a doctor on Sundays, and their religion says they cant work on Sundays, Im not going to hire them. I dont think anybody would have a problem with that, but when it comes to an astronomer, suddenly its terrible that were discriminating against them. I dont think it is. Im sorry, Ive been giving you long answers to these -- I tend to do that -- but this is an interesting case where its not straightforward. Its not a bumper sticker issue where I can just say it in six words. It doesnt work that way. There are layers and levels and subtlety to a lot of this, and thats why I get unhappy when I hear people sort of rallying on one side or the other based on their own prejudices. Youve got to really look at the details of this, and thats why I never wrote about this issue, because the more I learned about it the more I realized that Id have to write a 5,000 word blog post, and nobodys going to read it.

KD: Switching topics here, how important is the work being done by Kepler?

PP: [Laughs]. The work being done by Kepler is super important, for a lot of reasons. The design of this mission is to sit and stare at one spot in the sky. Its looking at 150,000 stars I think, and its just staring at them. Its looking for tell-tale signs of a planet passing between us and that star. So, if theres a star in that field, and its got planets orbiting it, and a planets orbit happens to line up such that it passes in front of the star, the starlight will dip a little bit. You can measure that dip, and by precisely measuring the length of time that dip takes and how much light is being blocked from the star, you can get an idea of the planets orbit and how big the planet is. We have some idea of planets orbiting other stars, but its sort of vague right now. The methods we had for looking at them didnt give us a good idea, statistically, of how many planets are out there and what theyre like. Keplers going to do that. So, by really staring at those stars, Keplers going to say, statistically, Heres how many stars have planets, heres how close they orbit to their star, heres how big they are, and thats really important right because we dont have those numbers. What its finding, statistically speaking, is that there may be billions -- with a b -- of planets in our galaxy alone, certainly millions, but maybe as many as billions that could be -- in some stretch of the imagination -- Earth-like. They are orbiting far enough from their star that temperatures at that planet could [allow] liquid water on them, which is what we think is really important for having life. There could be other kinds of life that dont need liquid water, but all the kinds we know do. If there is liquid water, that means our kind of life has a shot, and that is one of those Really Big Questions, Is there life in space? Holy crap! Is there a cooler question you can ask that we have a really good shot at answering in the next few years? No, there really isnt one, and thats it. The proof of that is basically if we find a fossil on Mars, Oh, look! Heres a fossil on Mars! The answer is, Yes, there is life on other planets. But you need to find these planets first, and thats what Kepler is doing. Its doing it very, very well. It has already found several dozen planets that could potentially be something like the Earth, or have Earth-like conditions at least. Thats frickin awesome.

KD: Some of the stars that Kepler is looking at are over 4,000 light-years away. Imagine that tomorrow you wake up and Kepler has found an Earth-like planet in the Goldilocks zone. Later observations find that its got liquid water, and oxygen in the atmosphere. But its 4,000 light-years away. How do you react to that?

PP: Thats a good point. Theres a sense of scale here that a lot of people dont have, because theyre just not familiar with how freaking big space is. Honestly? 4,000 light years isnt that much different than 4, because both of them are really, really far away. A light year is six trillion miles, and our faster probes ever launched would take tens of thousands of years to get to the nearest star. So, honestly, is 4,000 light years any worse than 4? In my opinion, no, thats not the point, how far away these planets are. The point is they exist. If we can find a planet orbiting another star, and we can actually observe it with our telescopes and say, Look, it has oxygen in its atmosphere, that would be really critical. Oxygen is really reactive, and its really hard to keep oxygen around unless youre producing it; otherwise, it goes away really quickly, and the best way to produce it, not the only way, but the best way, is biology -- is something alive and making that oxygen. If we were to find that, holy crap, would that be awesome! That would really be strong evidence that there is life on other planets. Even if we got a signal from intelligent life on these planets, its not so much the distance thats important. Its the fact that it happened, and were not alone, that there could be other life out there. Now, very briefly if I can, the difference in distance comes in because if we do detect a signal... Imagine if we dont just detect oxygen in an atmosphere, but we get a radio signal from one of these planets, the difference between 4 light-years and 4,000 is huge. The speed of light is really fast, and if there are aliens living on Alpha Centauri trying to communicate with us, we can send them a signal and hear back from them in 8 or 9 years. If we try to have a conversation with somebody 4,000 light-years away, its going to take 8,000 years to hear something back. So, we might at least have something resembling a conversation with somebody whos close, but thats a pretty big if. Im more interested right now in the much more realistic chance of us finding Earth-like planets, than us finding aliens we can talk to.

KD: What are your plans for the near future? Are you working on a new book? Are we going to get some more Bad Universe?

PP: Well, Im getting a lot of tattoos and piercings. Im hoping to be a model for Suicidegirls. Ive got the pale skin, I never see sunlight, so I should fit right in. Actually, Im hoping that the network will pick up the show as a series. It was basically sort of a pilot to see if they would run it as a series, so Im waiting to see if that will happen. In the meantime Im still writing the blog. I have a couple of book ideas Im working on right now, nothing I can talk about specifically, because theyre still in the proposal stage. A lot of other things [are] keeping me busy. I really, really enjoy writing and giving talks about this kind of stuff, so Im still doing that. I dont know! This is my... fifth? career. I was a research scientist, a writer, a public outreach guy, I was in education for a while, and now Im a blogger. The evolution of an astronomer goes from cutting edge scientific research to sitting around in my pajamas railing in my blog about how they cancelled Stargate: Universe, but honestly, its a lot of fun. I love having the ability to talk about this stuff, and actually have a voice on the Internet. To be able to say, Heres something you guys may not know about that you might find interesting, and is actually kind of important, that is terrific, even if it does mean I dont see the Sun for three or four days in a row. Its important to me, and I think its important in the grand scheme of things to open this door to people who might not otherwise see it. A lot of stories go away that really deserve to be investigated, or at least read by people out there, like, Look, heres this galaxy thats kind of throwing a monkey-wrench into how we think things work. Look over here. This star, why is it doing this? What would happen if this thing were to do that? I love writing about that, and from the comments I get, the emails I get, the questions, the tweets on Twitter, people love this stuff. They want their minds expanded. They want to know whats going on in the universe without all the B.S. about it, and thats what Im trying to do. Thats my goal in life. If I can take somebody by the hand and say, Look over here. Look at this thing right here. Isnt that awesome? If I can achieve that every now and again, thats it, Ive got it made.